The Problem with DIBELS

1. In my experience here in the states, both as a parent and a mental health professional who sits in on special education teams, the biggest failure in this area seems to be with the Administrators such as Principals. Their Lasse fare treatment of educational law and it’s updates causes a lot of problems along with their attempted cover-ups and back peddling. Not to mention out and out lying. Most Adminstrators have been in the field for a long time and are sitting behind a desk waiting for a bigger retirement check. While conversely special ed teachers and nowadays teachers in general are relatively young, untested and afraid of losing their jobs. They do what they are told to avoid this. The best answer is for parents to have advocates. We have programs which I’m sure are on the chopping block for parent advocacy but most parents don’t know this until it’s too late. One family I worked with even brought in a lawyer for one meeting. Most can’t afford that but I can tell you that that kid got THE MOST help available for his situation after that meeting and the Principal was moved,(and later fired for fishy use of school funding) If we are going to utilize public systems we have to educate ourselves along with our kids on what their rights are. Read the student rights booklets. They mostly look the same year after year but some small things usually change and in California at least we are required to sign off on them, so we are in effect saying yes I have all the info.
   Be involved, Kids are not accessories or a rounding out of our life’s dreams. They are people.
   And I say again, standardized testing works for no body and is a stress to the best performers.. It should be tossed and kids should be tested when a need is clearly identified with a team in place to discuss the child’s BEST interest.

2. I’d say, be careful on anything you sign. They are contractual agreements which effectively say you will abide by the policy without question. In instances where you find small print that might cause future conflicts, you should list your reservations and sign it, “all rights reserved without prejudice”. This leaves you unencumbered by the paper document that wavered your rights to your own sound judgment.

   Our children are our own best interests. We will invest more money into the costs of their upbringing than any material asset we own. We will impart to them our hereditary customs, our belief systems, even our dreams of the future. They are a full time job. If we surrender our rights to determine the best educational course for our children, we are surrendering a large portion of our responsible parenthood.

   As Tony so aptly pointed out, standardized tests don’t fit across the board. They vary in accordance to environment, family interactive time, general pursuits or interests and special learning abilities. There is even a classification of people we fondly call “late bloomers”; children who demonstrate no special learning skills at the onset of their early education, but that suddenly develop into astonishing academic awareness during or shortly after puberty.

   Minds are so many things; building their synapse of coordinated informational understanding through diamond shaped passage ways of neuron connections. Some grow rapidly through building block association, some leap and bound, generating more activity in some areas than others, some activate more memory components, displaying amazing clarity of visual awareness, without any true development of the mind chart that houses mathematics or arts; the two big thinking muscles of the brain. Maybe we should submit all aspiring teachers to a brain scan to determine if they are using the rote of memory or if they actually understand the mathematical/artistic base of their thinking.

3. The only things I’ve seen my kids respond to had a screen in front of it, a keyboard or a set of controls. Have you noticed the toys offered for infants? Buttons to push, lights to flash, sounds to make; miniature computers set up for babies. You want to talk about spatial skills? Try looking for a set of wooden blocks, painted with the ABC’s on the sides in a Walmart’s or Fred Myer’s store. How many kids can do simple multiplication without their calculators? The power suddenly goes out in the grocery store. The clerk is left with the task of counting back your money by hand. Oh the agony of the dilemma in figuring out that the change from a thirty-seven and sixty three cent purchase paid with two twenty dollar bills is two dollars and thirty-seven cents.

   I’m not against educational toys that increase technological skills, but they don’t fill the requisites for learning the basics, and that includes adequate responses without a computer monitor. We should forget all this readiness mumble jumble and return to teaching readiness. Give kids back their alphabet blocks, their colored triangles, circles and squares, their crayola crayons. Give them back their mud pie making play. Whatever they are to become will be apparent soon enough, even if it’s a cook instead of a rocket scientist. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my daughter wants the computer to play World of War Craft.

4. Apologize for my bad english, I deliberate on its a precarious hell of your writing. Well I be suffering with faced alot of difficulties in this form but your article discretion definately help me in future. Thank You

5. Really well article but I doesn’t see a source?

6. […] problems are made even worse when the tests themselves are bad. I am but one of many teachers (and parents) who have fought battles over DIBELS, a test that has been widely adopted despite controversies […]

7. Thanks a lot for this resource, I will put it to my early childhood education articles.

8. It is good to see this website is finally getting the attention that it really deserves. Keep up the fantastic work.

9. Just to be clear, is the issue here the fact that the student was a special education student?

   Because the fact of the matter is that DIBELS is not necessarily “specialized assessment”, it is often a standard assessment given to every child in a class. As such, this would make it no different than any other ongoing formative (or even summative) assessment administered by a teacher in class — including homework assignments, worksheets, and quizzes. Is a teacher required to write home to inform the parent of every single upcoming worksheet or quiz and receive parental consent for those, as well? That notion is absurd.

   Guess what? I have generalized anxiety disorder. This doesn’t mean I get to be exempt from job performance observations or evaluations, whether they stress me out or not. When are these parents who are sheltering their children going to learn that their kids need to learn how to function in the real world at some point?

   If parents are entitled to withhold their children from being assessed at school, then this defeats the entire notion of grades, assessment, and evaluation of ability. (Heck, why even evaluate people for promotions or raises at their jobs?) If every parent were to try to micromanage their childrens’ classroom activities this way (including assessments), schools would cease to function. If parents want to control every aspect of a child’s learning, there is really only one way to do that: home-schooling.

   Nowhere in this Alberta school act does it say parents get to make the final decisions. It says “ensure parents have the opportunity for participation in decisions that affect students’ education” — OPPORTUNITY for PARTICIPATION in decisions. This could be as simple as an open forum for addressing concerns via principal or board meetings. Nowhere does it say that the school has to OBEY the parent concerns. “Participation” in a decision does not mean the decision has to be (a) unanimous, or (b) approved by the parent.

10. The student was classified as having a severe speech issues as well as an anxiety disorder that leads to bouts of serious depression. You are correct, the school board has defended its ability to use this assessment on students because it adopted it as a school policy, however, it should be noted it is not mandated by the Alberta government for it to be used. It should also be pointed out that, as the school superintendent pointed out rather forcefully, that it is up to the discretion of the principal whether or not the assessment is used. If a child cannot pronounce a word properly, according to DIBELS, it is a fail. DIBELS is an oral assessment to test reading competency – since when does being able to pronounce a word properly show that a person understands? DIBELS is a subjective assessment and that is where its biggest failure is.

    Sorry that you have a general anxiety disorder, but tell me, if you have don’t get a good job performance review, do you consider hurting yourself? The student in question was in grade two, where the child’s agenda outlines every spelling, social, language, etc, exam and homework, so to retort to your allegation of absurdity, then the school was already being quite absurd, now weren’t they? At this age there is just the emergence of problem solving skills, but they need to be developed further to become adequate coping skills. How are parents supposed to foster these skills if their child is told by their teacher, “just don’t tell your mom and dad what we did today, okay”? Does that even sound like ethical or professionalism? Here is another educational absurdity to ponder – in this particular school; there is no failing a grade. No matter how poorly a child grasps a basic concept, they are moved onto the next grade regardless. Several parents were worried at their child’s lack of ability to grasp the concepts, so they requested that their child be left in the grade in hopes that perhaps another year going over these concepts would perhaps rote themselves into the child’s learning pattern. The school said “no” – it was a matter of a child’s self esteem if they were to be left behind while their classmates moved on. This is short term thinking; what does the greater damage, failing continuously on the more complicated concepts since the basic ones were not fully understood, each year getting more and more frustrated, or simply keep the child where they can perhaps success?

    Let us delve further into whether or not parents should, at times micromanage their children in the school. There are times where there should be parental involvement in exactly what is done with their child in a school setting. For example, a child is left handed, yet despite parents telling the teacher that, she continually uses right handed techniques and cannot fathom why the child’s writing skill isn’t improving. Should not a parent be more assertive? Or do they simply watch their child go through the grades with poor penmanship that will get marks taken off in later grades? Another example, a grade one teacher tells her class that “anyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus is wrong” – and the child has relatives of Islamic faith? Should not the parents intervene and let the teacher know that they expect their child to learn tolerance of different beliefs? Or do they sit back and watch as their child tells the relatives that they are wrong for believing what they do? Here’s an example, a child has an aide because he has special needs and the parents have told the teacher and the aide that he will run if not watched. The school decides that the best way to handle this is to put up a sign with a picture of the school door with an “X” through it – it does not inform the parents nor do they inform the parents of the success or failure of this though the parents are told by other parents that they prevented that child from leaving the school because the aide was no where in sight? It’s a security issue, isn’t it? If the child runs out on the road and gets struck, where does that leave the parents?

    To your last point – opportunity. There was no opportunity – the school did not supply the parents with any information that they were using DIBELS after the parents objected. There was no opportunity for the parents to go to the school board. The school act does provide avenues to parents when they have disputes with the school, however, if parents are left in the dark, those avenues are closed, aren’t they? The issue comes down to what are parental rights? Are they superseded by a school principal? How are parents to help their child if they aren’t aware of where the depression is originating from because the school does not provide information. The educational system is not about the individual, it is about putting things in nice little boxes that says “A” or “B”; parents have the ability to see the uniqueness of their child, if they wish to, and that knowledge should be used to make the education of the child maximum. It is not about controlling a child’s education; it is about inserting common sense where there is a lack of it in order to best facilitate that child’s learning later on.

11. As a special needs teacher who uses DIBELS this topic caught my attention. Two big things jump out:

    1) Tt seems that the special needs teacher was doing a minimalist job, only using one form of activity or assesment (at least this is the way it reads)

    2) The teacher could have substituted something else for DIBELS: 6 min solution, ReadWell, NEXT, etc…too bad most of them are very very close to the same to each other. Why? Research has shown that timed testing fluency creates dramatic improvement. Teachers are often willing to agree with the research than agree with parents, after all, it is their job to show improvement in student performance.

12. James T, you brought up two good points, though I am unsure whether you can classify it as minimalistic, but more ignorance of the individual. There is an educational myth that every child will reach a certain benchmark at a certain age, however, even in family units, not all children ‘mature’ in the same areas as their siblings do.

    The second point you made was teachers tend to agree with parent orientated research – I would like to live in your area because around Alberta, and I suspect median percentage of the other Canadian and American school districts the education system is driven by ‘educational professionals’ which deem it inappropriate to explain or attempt to bring parents/guardians in on their program designs.

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